Part I: The Islamic Quest
2
The Coming of the Prophet
3
Building Islam
4
Baghdad’s Splendour
5
The Caliph of Science
6
The Flowering of Andalusia
7
Beyond the Abbasids

15
17
29
39
55
65
81

Part II: Branches of Learning
8
The Best Gift From God
9
Astronomy: The Structured Heaven
10 Number: The Living Universe of Islam
11 At Home in the Elements
12 Ingenious Devices

93
95
117
139
153
161

Part III: Second Thoughts
13 An Endless Frontier
14 One Chapter Closes, Another Begins
15 Science and Islam: Lessons From History

167
169
187
207

Timeline

217

Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index

223
227
233

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Ehsan Masood is Acting Chief Commissioning Editor
at Nature. Formerly Opinion Editor at New Scientist, he
writes for Prospect and OpenDemocracy.net and is a regular panellist on BBC Radio 4â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Home Planet. He teaches
international science policy at Imperial College London.

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List of illustrations
Black and white images in the text
1. Urban knowledge: Islam’s cities of science from viii
the 8th to the 16th centuries housed hospitals,
observatories, libraries, colleges and schools for
translation, as well as much individual research.
2. Numerals through the ages: Brahmi numerals 141
from India in the 1st century CE, the medieval
Arabic-Indic system, and the symbols used today.
Colour plate section
1. Aerial view of Mecca in the final days of the
Ottoman empire, 1872
2. A coin, believed to be from the Islamic
middle ages
3. The courtyard and sundial of the Umayyad
mosque in Damascus
4. The main courtyard area of Al‑Azhar university
in Cairo
5. The 12th-century Nur al‑Din Hospital
6. A nilometer in Cairo, from the 9th century
7. The city walls of Rayy, in modern Iran
8. A page from the 13th-century Compendium of
Astronomy by Nasir al‑Din al‑Tusi (1201–74)

vii

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1. Urban knowledge: Islamâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cities of science from the 8th to the 16th centuries housed hospitals, observatories,
libraries, colleges and schools for translation, as well as much individual research.

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and I slam

Science

viii

A note on language
A book on science during the Islamic empires presents
some interesting challenges for the science writer of
today writing in English, and at a time when a good deal
of sensitivity surrounds the use of words and phrases on
all things Islamic, or Muslim.
Questions to do with God and religion are not mainstream to the process of how science is done, nor its
many and varied products. Because of this, science writing (at least in English) has yet to develop a comprehensive vocabulary on the topic of science and religion.
The publishers of Science and Islam: a History, however, couldn’t wait for a dictionary on science and belief.
They needed a consistent short-hand phrase to describe
the science that took place during the empires that followed the birth of Islam. And several candidates were
shortlisted for the job.
One option was to use ‘Muslim science’, except that
not all of the scientists mentioned in the following pages
were Muslims. Another option was to go for ‘Arab science’, except that many practitioners were not from the
Arab world, even if they were Arabic-speaking.
As so often happens with dilemmas in cultural relations, the best solution was to look for a compromise.
The phrase that this book employs to describe science in
Islamic times is ‘Islamic science’. It isn’t perfect by any
means, but it comes closest to the mark.
ix

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An explanation of why Islamic science was chosen
is needed, because to many readers Islamic science will
be as nonsensical as Jewish science, Christian science,
or Hindu science. Science is a universal tool for knowing about the world we live in: the individual beliefs of
scientists have no bearing on the nature of what it is that
they are investigating. One of the best examples of this is
the 1979 Nobel prize in physics: this was shared between
Muhammad Abdus Salam, a devout believer, and Steven
Weinberg, a devout atheist.
To other readers, however, if something is ‘Islamic’
this means it is related to the practice of faith. To this
group of readers, therefore, Islamic science might mean
a science that is influenced by Islamic values, much as,
say, Islamic banking is used to describe financial systems
that are governed according to Islamic guidelines; or in
the same way that an Islamic school is an institution that
educates children according to Islamic values.
Just to be clear, Islamic science in the context of this
book also includes a science that has been shaped by the
needs of religion.
The second challenge relates to the word ‘science’
itself and what it means in languages such as Arabic,
Persian and Urdu. The word ‘science’ in its modern
context means the systematic study of the natural world,
using observation, experimentation, measurement and
verification. It comes from the Latin word (from around
the 14th century) scientia, which means ‘to know’.
Arabic manuscripts from Islamic times did not have a
word for ‘science’ as we know it today. Instead, they had

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A Note

on

Language

a word similar in meaning to scientia, which is ilm (plural,
uloom). Ilm means ‘knowledge’: this could be knowledge
of the natural world, as well as knowledge of religion and
other things.
Scientists in the Ottoman empire came closest to
realising that ilm is not the same as the scientific method.
They introduced a new word, fen (plural, funoon), which
means ‘tools’ or ‘techniques’. For example, a university
of science would be written in Turkish Arabic as darul
funoon, or a home for the techniques of science.
The new Ottoman convention, however, did not catch
on. Turkish Arabic is all but extinct and Modern Arabic
has retained the original dual usage for the word ilm. So,
while the Arabic edition of Scientific American magazine
is called Majalla Uloom (magazine of knowledge), at the
same time, darul uloom (a home for knowledge) is used
to describe religious seminaries all over the world.
Those who continue to use ilm to mean both scientific and religious knowledge argue that it represents
an idea (common to Islamic cultures) that science and
faith are two sides of the same coin: that they are equally
valid forms of knowledge, and with similar – if not equal
– claims to seek the most truthful answers to questions.
Others would disagree. Ilm may well be an accurate
description for religious knowledge; however, there is a
case to be made for finding a word that can distinguish
between scientific and religious knowledge.
In languages such as Arabic and Urdu, ‘acquiring
ilm’ is a phrase that is commonly used in textbooks, in
print and in the broadcast media. Knowledge of religion
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can of course be ‘acquired’ or memorised, as can much
scientific­ knowledge. But science has an important added
dimension: it is also about experimenting, innovating,
building, refuting and pushing at the boundaries of what
we know.

xii

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Prologue

Picture, if you will, images from the 1969 moon landings:
those grainy black-and-white photos or slow-motion
TV shots of rockets and astronauts in space, and aweinspired spectators watching from below. Or recall the
television footage from 2000 when the human genome
had been sequenced, with the news announced jointly by
US President Bill Clinton and Britain’s Prime Minister
Tony Blair.
What do these and so many more pictures of modern
scientific discovery tell us? One message is very clear:
that science is more than just ‘science’. It is the result of
the vision of those who govern us about where they want
to take their societies in the future. The moon landings
told anyone watching that here was an empire at the top
of its game. Having established its domain on earth, the
most technologically-advanced society of its age was
ready to claim the heavens – or at the very least, a small
part of it.
More than 1,000 years ago, another empire, that
created­ by the coming of Islam, was at the top of its form.
xiii

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This empire was in fact a network of what are called
caliphates, united by a belief in God and in the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. Its rulers and citizens
spanned from Indonesia in the east to Spain in the west,
and the last of the caliphates ended only in the last century, in 1923 with the fall of the Ottoman empire.
Science and Islam describes the scientific revolution
that took place during the empires created by Islam,
between the 8th and the 16th centuries. It is a story about
the discoveries and inventions of a sophisticated culture
and civilisation; the political and religious conditions
surrounding it; and an extraordinary cast of characters
– scientists, engineers and their patrons – who helped to
make it all happen.
It describes an age when religion and science had a
much closer relationship. Perhaps paradoxically, it was
the needs of religion that in some ways helped to advance
new knowledge. One example can be seen in efforts to
develop quality standards in religious scholarship. After
Muhammad’s death in 632, scholars of religion wanted
to find a way of checking and verifying the many records
of his sayings. This led to a kind of early peer-review
system, which later scholars of religion had to train themselves in. A century later, when scientific fields began to
develop, it was theologians who encouraged the first scientists to adopt similar standards for authenticating their
scientific work.
In its heyday, scientists and engineers from the Islamic
world made groundbreaking discoveries and inventions,
and we can see traces of their contributions today in our
xiv

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P rologue

everyday lives. Moreover, many of the leaders of Islam’s
empires saw the relationship between science and society
as would politicians in the modern age. They believed
that the power of the mind could take us to places where
no human had ventured in the past; they wanted the latest knowledge in order to help govern their territories
and eliminate their enemies; and they wanted to shape
societies in which people made decisions based on evidence and in which science, technology and rational
thinking were important.
But then is not the same as now. Today’s scientific
endeavour is on a scale that is unprecedented in human
history. In the United States, more is spent on healthcare
research than the total spending of some of the world’s
poorest nations. And on the question of belief, today’s
scientists tend to keep their faith strictly private. Indeed,
in the Western world at least, organised religion and individual religious faith are regarded by perhaps the majority of scientists as impediments to research, discovery
and invention.
Today, knowledge is a highly specialised business:
it is almost unheard of for a leading physicist to make
ground-breaking discoveries in biology, or a chemist to
push the envelope in philosophy. But many of the names
that leap out of the pages that follow were polymaths
who worked to the highest standards of the day.
In the pages that follow, you will meet many great
thinkers such as ibn-Sina, a Persian-speaking scientist
from the 10th century who also made important contributions to the study of the nature and philosophy of
xv

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religious belief. He also found time to invent an early
example of the micrometer, and his book The Canon of
Medicine was taught to trainee doctors in universities in
France and Italy from the 12th to the 16th century. Or
there is Hassan ibn al‑Haitham, an experimental physicist from the 11th century who helped to modernise
our understanding of vision and who is credited with
describing an early imaging device (a camera obscura),
as well as writing about and researching the motion of
planets.
You will also meet some of their patrons. Caliphs
and governors such as al‑Mamun of the Sunni Abbasid
dynasty, who ruled from 813 to 833 from Baghdad,
and al‑Hakim of the Shia Fatimid dynasty who ruled
from Cairo from 996 to 1021. These and many others
employed personal scientific advisors, paid for libraries
and observatories, and even personally took part in scientific experiments.
And you will meet some of the critics of the new science. These were men such as the theologian Abu Hamid
al‑Ghazali, who wrote a famous polemic, The Incoherence
of the Philosophers, against the claims of scientists to be
able to explain everything. And you will meet those scholars who suffered greatly for the right to criticise science
and rationalism, men such as Ahmad ibn-Hanbal, who
was tortured for refusing to accept that science should
become the official religion of the Islamic state.
Turn the page and enter a brave, new and undiscovered world.
Ehsan Masood
xvi

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1

The Dark Age Myth
If there is much misunderstanding in the West about the nature of
Islam, there is also much ignorance about the debt our own culture
and civilisation owe to the Islamic world. It is a failure which stems,
I think, from the strait-jacket of history which we have inherited.
HRH Prince Charles in a speech at Oxford University,
27 October 1993

In 410 CE, Alaric, the Germanic king of the Visigoths,
swept into Rome and sacked the great city in a three-day
rampage. Sixty-six years later, Romulus Augustus, the last
Roman emperor of the West, was deposed, and the regalia of empire was rudely despatched to Constantinople.
With that, the lights went out on civilisation, and the
Western world was plunged into an age of darkness – a
night in which there was no scholarship, literacy or even
civilised life. Only 1,000 years later did the world finally
rediscover classical learning and bring the world’s night
of darkness to an end with the bright new dawn of the
Renaissance. Or so the story goes.

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This is the myth of the Dark Ages, the idea that history and progress pretty much stopped for a millennium
after the fall of Rome. The trouble is that the myth is just
that, a myth. But it has been a myth so potent that it has
thoroughly distorted our understanding of how civilisations emerge and how science and learning progress.
Advances in our understanding of the natural world
happen when scientists absorb the latest knowledge in
fields such as physics or biology, and then modify or
improve it. They work rather like runners in a relay race,
passing the baton of learning from one scientist to the
next. Modern science, regarded as a hallmark of modern
Western civilisation, achieved its place through the passing of many successive batons, which were handed to
the scientists of Europe from those of the world’s nonWestern cultures. These included those who lived in the
cultures of Islam over a period of some 800 years from
the 8th to the 16th centuries.
The fact that we know little of this is what Michael
Hamilton Morgan of the New Foundation for Peace
speaks of as ‘lost history’. The historian Jack Goody
goes further and calls it ‘the theft of history’. It is as if
the memory of an entire civilisation and its contribution
to the sum of knowledge has been virtually wiped from
human consciousness. Not simply in the West but in the
Islamic world too, the achievements of Islamic scientists
were, until recently, largely forgotten or at least neglected,
except by a few diligent specialists such as Harvard
University’s Abelhamid Sabra, David King, Jamil Ragep
and George Saliba.

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The Dark Age Myth

In mainstream science education in Britain – until very
recently – the history of scientific progress has tended to
leapfrog from the classical era of Euclid, Aristotle and
Archimedes straight to the birth of the Age of Science
in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, with only a cursory
mention, if any, of the great swathe of Islamic science
in between. In some versions of history, the ‘dark age’
only really ends, and the progress of science only really
begins, with the famous conflict in the early 17th century
in which Galileo confronts the Catholic Church with the
assertion that the earth moves around the sun. As the
world eventually acknowledges that Galileo is right, this
is presented as the world-changing triumph of the light
of reason over superstition. Thereafter, from the 17th
century onwards, Western Europe’s scientists are set free
to unlock the world’s secrets – William Harvey discovers blood circulation, Isaac Newton launches the study
of physics, Robert Boyle pioneers the study of chemistry, Michael Faraday, electricity, and so on. And so we
move forward into the Age of Reason and the dramatic
progress of modern science.

Filling the gap
In reality, though, scientific inquiry did not simply stop
with the fall of Rome, only to get going again in the 17th
century. In fact, as this book will show, recent research is
beginning to reveal just how thoroughly the 800-year gap
was filled by a wealth of scientific exploration in medieval

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Islam, and how it fed directly into the first stirrings of
Western science.
The Cairo-based physician ibn al‑Nafis, for example, discovered pulmonary circulation, the circulation of
blood through the lungs, in the 13th century. Andalusian
engineer Abbas ibn-Firnas worked out theories of flight,
and is believed to have carried out a successful practical experiment six centuries before Leonardo drew his
famous ornithopters. And in Kufa in Iraq, Jabir ibnHayyan (translated by Latin scholars as Geber) was
among those laying the foundations of chemistry around
900 years before Boyle.
Moreover, some researchers are now showing that
some of the great pioneers of modern science were building directly on the work of scientists from Islamic times.
George Saliba of Columbia University, for instance,
demonstrates in his book Islamic Science and the Making
of the European Renaissance how the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus drew on the work of Islamic
astronomers for the groundwork to his breakthrough
claim in 1514 that the earth moved round the sun.
Historians of mathematics have also shown how
algebra, a branch of maths that allows scientists to work
out unknown quantities, was developed in 9th-century
Baghdad by Musa al‑Khwarizmi, building on work
that he had discovered from mathematicians in India.
Historians think that al‑Khwarizmi would have had
access to manuscripts through Islam’s first encounter
with India, which happened a century earlier. Modern
science depends, too, on the solutions to complex

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The Dark Age Myth

quadratic equations devised by the poet and scientist
Omar Khayyam. And much of our understanding of
optics and light is built on the pioneering work of Hassan
ibn al‑Haitham (translated in Latin as Alhazen) in 11thcentury­ Cairo.

Inventing the future?
The Islamic middle ages also left a strong legacy in the
applied sciences. The nature of Islam, and the energy
of a new empire, meant that there were many inventive and practical minds at work. According to Salim
al‑Hassani of the University of Manchester, some modern labour-saving devices such as the drinks dispenser
could have an Islamic influence. Professor al‑Hassani has
recently introduced the world to some of the engineering achievements­ of al‑Jazari, a 13th-century Turkish
engineer, which include the crank, the camshaft and the
reciprocating piston – all essential components of the
modern car engine and much more besides. Meanwhile,
a remarkable trio of irreverent but brilliant showman
brothers, called Banu Musa, entertained 9th-century
Baghdad with such ingenious trick machines and automatons that they would astonish even today.
If all these examples were fleeting moments of brilliance, they would be fascinating enough. But as many
more teachers and historians are realising, they are
much more than that. Names such as al‑Khwarizmi and
ibn al‑Haitham are as integral to the history of science
and technology as are Newton and Archimedes, James

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Watt and Henry Ford, but the Arabic-sounding names
somehow became lost in the myth of the Dark Ages.
The reasons for this are the subject of an intense debate,
which is as much about the relationship between the
West and Islam as it is about the history of science and
technology.

Lost in the dark
The idea that the Renaissance world was emerging from
a period of darkness can be traced back to at least the
1330s, when the Italian historian Petrarch wrote of how
it was that the world finally saw the light. ‘Amidst the
errors,’ he said, ‘there shone forth men of genius, no less
keen were their eyes, although they were surrounded by
darkness and dense gloom.’ It may be that Petrarch was
simply trying to link the emergence of Italian culture in
his own time with its former heyday in Ancient Rome.
But it is through men such as Petrarch that the notion
of the dark ages was sustained, as Europe progressed
towards the Enlightenment years of the 18th century
and beyond. Perhaps tellingly, it reached its apogee, and
acquired capital letters, when nations such as Britain, the
Netherlands and Portugal introduced both Christianity
and colonial rule into the continents of Africa and Asia.
By this time, the Dark Ages had come to be seen as a
time of decline into brute ignorance, full of ‘rubbish’, as
Gibbon had earlier sneered in his Decline and Fall.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that this negative picture
of the Dark Ages finally began to crumble along with the

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The Dark Age Myth

colonial empires. Many Western historians are now generally embarrassed by the distortion of history implied
by the idea, and if they talk about dark ages, it tends only
to be in a less pejorative sense, about periods that remain
little known because of the dearth of written evidence.
It is hard for them to see how an age that produced the
Book of Kells, the scholarship of Alcuin and Bede, and
countless great churches and monasteries could ever be
thought of as an age of brute ignorance. More significantly, though, a tide of recent archaeological and textual
research is now painting a much richer, fuller picture
of life in Western Europe in the centuries after the fall
of Rome, and even the idea that this is an unknowable
period for the West is evaporating.
But of course the most distorting effect of the Dark
Ages myth was the way it seemed to sideline, in the popular imagination at least, the history of the world beyond
Western Europe – and virtually ignore the fact that learning had simply shifted eastwards, not completely flickered out. First of all, the Dark Ages myth seemed to turn
a blind eye to the fact that the Roman empire did not
actually end with the fall of Rome, but moved its centre
to Byzantium. As the work of the historian Judith Herrin
of King’s College London shows so well, we are just
beginning to wake up to the fact that cultural life – a rich
cultural life – existed in Byzantium for the entire duration of the Dark Ages. And if Christian Byzantium was
left in the shadows, equally telling has been the neglect of
the achievements of early Islam.

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The Dark Ages myth proved so powerful that even
in some academic circles the best that could be said
of Islamic scholarship was that it saved the great classical texts so that Europe could rediscover them in the
Renaissance – as if retrieving them from a hole where
they had been squirrelled away while the thousand-year
storm blew past. With the old treasures retrieved, it was
surmised, Islam was no longer needed and it was up to
Europe alone to take knowledge forward.

Distorted imaginations
There are two main ways in which the Dark Ages myth
has distorted the truth about the Islamic contribution to
knowledge, culture and, in particular, science.
The first is the idea that the scholars of Islam acted as
little more than custodians to the great classical works of
scholarship, and added little of substance to the progress
of human knowledge. Just how wrong that view could
be will become clear later on. But it has led to much of
the attention around the scholarship of the Islamic middle ages being focused on the ‘Translation Project’, the
extraordinary movement to translate many of the great
works of ancient Greece into Arabic, during Islam’s
so-called Golden Age under the Abbasid caliphs in the
9th century. This was indeed a phenomenal achievement, and it did ensure that the best of classical learning
was not lost. But it seems likely that it is just one part
of the sustained Arabic scholarship that began before
the Golden Age of the Abbasids and endured for many

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The Dark Age Myth

centuries after, spreading well beyond Abbasid Baghdad,
into Cairo and Cordoba, Persia and Uzbekistan.
There is what some scholars call a ‘classical narrative’ about Islamic science that has been put forward by
orientalists in the past. This tells us that Muslim intellectual life shone for a few centuries under the Abbasids
and their immediate successors. The Abbasids, led by
the Caliph al‑Mamun, were on the side of a progressive,
rationalist approach to Islam, which enabled Muslims
to take on board Greek learning in translation. But the
growing influence of a conservative tendency which
gave more weight to literalism in revelation and less to
human logic gradually stifled scholarship. The turning
point was a famous polemic against intellectuals in the
12th century by the theologian Abu Hamid al‑Ghazali
called The Incoherence of the Philosophers. When Baghdad
and many other Islamic cities were destroyed by the horrific Mongol raids in the following century, Islam turned
inwards and intellectual life declined – at just the time
when the Europeans were able to go forward with the
essentially Greek body of knowledge passed on by the
Arabic scholars of the Golden Age.
The problems with this classical narrative are gradually being exposed, however. The philosophical standoff between the so-called rationalists and literalists was
far more nuanced than it suggests, and the idea that
Islamic science came to an end after al‑Ghazali, or even
the Mongol raids, is now known to be wrong. Some of
the greatest minds of the Islamic era, such as al‑Jazari,
ibn al‑Nafis and the astronomer Nasir al-Din al‑Tusi,

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carried­ on the tradition well beyond the first stirrings of
the European Renaissance.

An Islam of the West
The second distortion created by the Dark Ages myth
is the notion that there was little or no positive contact
between the West and Islam, and little real exchange of
ideas, except for the eventual passing on of classical texts
prior to the Renaissance.
There is no doubt that the history of the Crusades
and the barriers of misunderstanding between the West
and Islamic countries today help to reinforce the impression that beneficial contact between Islam and the West
was minimal. It is highly likely, too, that many scholars
in the Renaissance later played down or even disguised
their connection to the Middle East for both political and
religious reasons. The notion of the Dark Ages has reinforced the impression of separation. How could there be
any contact between Islamic civilisations and a Europe
lost in barbarian darkness?
Much new scholarship and archaeological research,
however, is challenging this assumption. It now seems
likely that there was considerable contact between Islam
and the West even as early as the 7th century. In some
ways, it is a mistake to talk about the Islamic ‘world’ and
the Western ‘world’, as people often do; what is more
accurate is to say that they are simply different parts of
the same world.

10

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The Dark Age Myth

The Arabs of Europe
For a start, Arabic-speaking merchants seem to have been
trading throughout Western Europe at this time, providing wealthy people with luxuries such as sugar, carpets
and silks. Gold dinar coins inscribed in Arabic have been
found across Europe dating from the 8th to the 10th
centuries. One of the most remarkable finds in England
is a gold coin from the time of the Mercian King Offa, of
Offa’s Dyke fame, around 773–96 CE. This coin, now in
the British Museum in London, is like the dinars minted
for the first Abbasid Caliph al‑Mansur in Baghdad in
773–4, with one exception – in the middle of the Arabic
words stating that ‘there is no God but Allah alone’, there
is inscribed in Latin capitals the name OFFA REX. A
few scholars believe strongly that this could be evidence
that Offa had converted to Islam. Equally likely, however,
is that Offa had the coins copied – Arabic inscription and
all – for the purpose of buying goods from the merchants
of the Islamic world. An early example, if you will, of the
idea of a trans-national single currency.
Across the English Channel at around the same
time, the Frankish king Charlemagne was minting silver
‘denarius’ coins, also clearly modelled on Arabic dinars.
He too was very much in the market for oriental luxuries.
Indeed, Charlemagne was at this time exchanging gifts
and letters with Baghdad’s Harun al‑Rashid, the caliph
made famous in The Thousand and One Arabian Nights
tales. In 801 CE, he sent Charlemagne an elephant called
Abul Abbas, which is believed to have caused a sensation
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in the streets of Aix-la-Chapelle. The caliph also sent the
king a carved ivory horn, a tray, a gold pitcher, a chess set,
a tent, brass candlesticks and a water clock that astonished
everyone who saw it and heard it striking the hour!
In addition, research from scholars such as Nabil
Matar of the University of London shows that there was
extensive and continuous contact between Islam and
Christian Europe throughout the early and late middle
ages in a host of different ways. Besides the merchants
and entertainers who plied their trade across Europe,
there was exchange of ideas and goods at every level in
the places where the worlds of Islam and Europe became
one – in Spain, in Sicily and in southern France – not to
mention via Byzantium.
Some of the ways in which Islamic science and technology fed into Europe will be explored later in this book.
At the same time, there are strong parallels between
many things Islamic and those long regarded as part of
the Western way of life. How they came to be will also be
explored in these pages.

A shared Europe
It is already well known that coffee came from the East.
According to one theory it was discovered after goat­
herds in Yemen, or perhaps Ethiopia (depending on
which version of the story you read), noticed how frisky
their charges became after eating certain berries. You
might even know that the sugar that sweetens coffee originated here too. Indeed, there are many more everyday­
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The Dark Age Myth

pleasures that are to be found in early Islam, but whose
history is not so well known.
Take gardens as a place of relaxation rather than just a
place for growing vegetables or herbs, for instance. They
came to us from Persia. ‘Early Muslims everywhere
made earthly gardens that gave glimpses of the heavenly
garden to come’, says the historian A.M. Watson in his
book Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World.
‘Long indeed would be the list of early Islamic cities
that could boast huge expanses of gardens.’ Islamic-era
Toledo boasted Europe’s first large botanical gardens in
the 11th century. Many of the traditional flowers that
grace the English garden also existed in the Islamic world
– tulips, carnations, irises, and of course that quintessentially English flower, the rose. So too did many garden
features, such as fountains and pergolas, conservatories
and bandstands, not to mention mazes and sunshades.
Move indoors and you might walk across the carpet
for a gentle game of chess. Both of these were also in use
in the early Islamic world. Islamic carpets were imported
as essential luxuries for centuries, long before the 18thcentury Industrial Revolution meant that they could be
made more cheaply in Europe. Chess, developed and
played in India, came to Europe around the 9th century
via Persia and Arabic-speaking Spain, and via the Viking
trade routes from central Asia. The word ‘checkmate’
is similar to the Persian shahmat, meaning ‘the king is
defeated’. After your game, you might drink an aperitif
from a glass – distillation and drinking-glasses are both
innovations developed in Islam.
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Science

and I slam

Even many deeper aspects of Western faith and culture are shared by those of the ancient Islamic world. The
arches of some cathedrals, those pinnacles of Christian
architecture, are shared by many mosques. And stainedglass windows were also used in Islamic times, as was
the music notation: ‘do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do’. Many of
our basic institutions, too, can also be found in the world
of medieval Islam, including public hospitals and libraries. The medicine of Hussain ibn-Sina (Avicenna) was
Europe’s default medical system up until the discovery
of germ theory.
The cultures of Islam nurtured – and continue to have
– a deep and rich tradition of love songs, poetry and
romantic literature, some of which would undoubtedly
have crossed over and synthesised with similar literary
traditions in Europe. These traditions include the idea
of doomed love – an early example of which is the 7thcentury story of Layla and Majnoon and its countless
variants, including of course Romeo and Juliet.
All of this might seem to have nothing directly to do
with science, but the connection is important. Once you
begin to appreciate something of the scope of the many
links between Islamic and European cultures, it seems
almost perverse to imagine that Islamic science and
technology had no real effect on Western learning, and
vice versa.